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August 30, 2016

Good morning lovelies! This fortnight is full of some great recipes and great tips to make your groceries stretch and work for your family. So check your pantry, make your list and plan your meals for the this fortnight (or week). Have a fabulous day!

Please keep in mind I do not use the traditional meal planning format which is planning exactly what meal is eaten on which day. Instead I figure out how many meals I need to plan for for this fortnight and then decide what we feel like eating for those meals (of course using my pantry and freezer as a starting point for these plans).

This fortnight there are a total of 15 dinners, of those 15 meals we are planning to eat at our families for 4 of these meals, leaving 11 meals I need to plan for.

beef rump steak, homemade mushroom sauce, vegetables, roast potatoes

meatloaf, veges, mashed potatoes & kumara, gravy

lamb shoulder chops, creamed spinach, veges, mashed potatoes & kumara

homemade pizza and possibly oven fries

homemade burgers and oven fries

spaghetti or baked beans on toast

fajita's

angus beef sausages, mashed potatoes & kumara, veges, gravy

honey soy beef and vegetable stir fry with rice

chicken pasta (cooked and frozen in our freezer already)

butter chicken and rice

NB: Vegetables are usually an assortment of broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, sweet corn.

January 28, 2014

Now that the hubby and I are living out on our own again, I have begun meal planning again in order to both save money and stay organised.

I first became a fan of meal planning back in 2012 (the hubby and I were living on our own) not long after I was made redundant and we had to learn to live on only one income for the first time ever. I will tell you now, we were not the most intelligent people when it came to budgeting and living within our means when we had two incomes coming into our house. We were both working well paid 42+ hour a week jobs which meant we were getting a lot of money, put getting paid alternate fortnights onto that and we were getting close to 1500 a week in wages. We did not save! I repeat again we did not save! At least definitely not as well as we should have, so when I was made redundant we did not have any sort of rainy day fund behind us which meant quickly learning to live on a very small budget.

During that time I learnt how to live on $60 a week for two people, two cats and run a house. I found my best option at the time was to shop fortnightly as that gave me a budget of $120 to work with which is a little easier then $60.

Now that I am back working again, the hubby has a much better job; we are much better off than before (and yes we are now saving, really saving, true saving in case something similar happens again) but I still prefer to budget out our wages and stick to it!

Currently I budget $500 a month on groceries. This is a large amount I know that, especially for two people and one cat. But it is a budget, not a target. From that $500 I budget $250 a fortnight. $200 in the main shop and $50 for top-ups in the second week (fresh fruit and veges, milk, bead & anything fresh we may require for meals planned).

At the moment we are finding that we are using the full $250 a fortnight, that is mainly due to the fact we are still setting ourselves up in our house and therefore are still buying a lot of basics for our pantry (baking ingredients, stocking our freezer with meat {when on special}, cleaning products etc).

We are hoping that once we have stocked our pantry and freezer enough we will only need around $150 a fortnight (including the second week top-up). Any money left over in our monthly grocery budget at that point, will stay in our grocery budget for the future. Sometimes things come up, a last minute dinner or summer BBQ invite, a shared lunch at work. Plus it is always nice to have a small cushion in your budget. If we find that we are grossly over budgeting then we will look at our budget and reallocate some of the money elsewhere (most likely to paying off debt faster).

This post was meant to be about how I meal plan and write a grocery list to accompany but it has instead turned into a background story and a grocery budget explanation. So I will leave that for another post. In future I will be putting a meal plan and accompanying grocery list up on here every fortnight (or there abouts), as well a possibly a recipe if the meal plan calls for a particular one.

If you would like a small run down of our whole budget, let me know and I will discuss with the hubby whether that is an option {personal info, you get the picture}. However I may look at doing a post about how I go about making my budget using an example income.

I share because I care, so feel free to use any of my images as long as they are credited and accompanied by a link back to Rambling Kiwi. Failure to link back and credit my site as a source constitutes a copyright violation. Thanks!!